In honour of the Fire Festival (and inspired by Kamelia) I’ve been playing around with the various outfits worn by my most commonly played characters. Each one is wearing one piece of Fire Festival specific clothing either from the set or the tabards you get from slaying Ahune.

The Midsummer Fire Festival is one of my favourites, purely because it pushes to me to get and about in Azeroth, visiting old haunts and finding new ones.

That’s one thing I miss about the revamped questing since Cataclysm, that sense of being sent from one zone to another and having to explore the world. Now you level so quickly, skipping zone after zone and it feels so much more instanced than ever before.

I’ve wanted a boat to call my own in WoW since at least 2010 and now I have one.

Not wholly convinced about the gondolier or the fact that this little boat seems to require the same depth of water as the Titanic to launch, when technically a puddle looks like it ought to do but it’s a start.

I really wanted to like these mini holidays but having tried out the Call of the Scarab, I’m struggling to see the point. Yes, there are now lots of people in Silithus again but other than that, it seems to lack focus. It was good to run AQ 40 again as I hadn’t been back for a while but it just highlighted the difference between the game then and the game now. Having to wait for Shield Wall cooldowns when we were pushing for server first kills on Princess Hurhuran is vastly different to two-shotting her on an undergeared level 95 Disc Priest. That said killing C’thun did put a smile on my face even though he went down in the duration of the average sneeze.

I also got around to collecting the Oracle set so Sprout now looks like this:

She also got exalted with the Cenarion Circle as an added and unexpected bonus. I gained almost a full level (95 to 96) from arrival by doing the world quests for the two AQ dungeons and also by doing a couple of the quests for the giant bugs which spawn in the hives which is decent gain, especially when compared against the alternative…. questing in Draenor.

Silithus is an underappreciated zone, I know I had forgotten how pretty it can be under a full moon so perhaps reliving our past glories was a sensible choice for the first micro holiday, I just wish that the Call of the Scarab had slightly more to do as part of it. The race to show your flag at the gates seems to be region wide too and I think we’re outnumbered, certainly we’re outnumbered in terms of people who are interested in taking part. I like being able to wear the Twilight cultist outfit over your own regular clothes, but a transmogrification set that could be farmed and/or sold on the auction house so that people unable to log wouldn’t miss out would have been better (I want the hood!).

It will be interesting to see how the other micro holidays play out and whether participation in them increases or decreases across the year. So far in terms of providing an interlude in leveling for a character high enough to level to solo the dungeons and do the world quests without dying, it’s been fun but my two level 110’s have found it a bit lacklustre, possibly because pvping over “lol sand” didn’t excite me at the time.

As a child I spent much of my childhood growing up in the real world version of Garrisons, military outposts set up on foreign soil. Instead of Santa bringing presents in something as pedestrian as a sleigh he would arrive in our school playground dangling from a Chinook and for the squadron party, he would turn up in a Harrier Jump Jet (perhaps not surprisingly given that’s what the squadron flew, with hindsight this also probably explains why my Father refused to let me aged 12, long legged and big eyed sit on Santa’s knee despite Santa’s attempts at insisting). Christmas abroad was taken far more seriously than at any school I attended in my own country. Ignoring the interesting ways in which they managed to spend the Defense budget when I was a child, I have to admit I’m finding the lack of festival related fun and games in our Garrisons both short sighted and rather sad. Nothing motivates the troops garrisoned in some foreign land like reminders of what they’re fighting for, therefore I feel Blizzard are missing a trick here.

There should be a bountiful table laden with food sitting in our garrison just as when Winter Veil rolls around we should get wreaths and a giant tree. Even better of course would be to let us decide/purchase decorations ourselves perhaps with garrison resources so that it’s a choice whether you want to cover your fountain in candles or hang axes from fir trees.

Along with the Day of the Dead, this Darkmoon Faire brings with it new and shiny goodies.

For the Toybox, you can pick up the following:

Haunting Memento bought from Chester for 90 Darkmoon Prize Tickets. This gives whoever you cast it on a 15 minute Haunted debuff and whilst the debuff is up, bad things can happen. So far I’ve seen a rather large quantity of nasty spiders spawn on me and have taken several panic attacks.

From the Beta I’d say the best strategy for this is to plan ahead before you start the quest and make sure you know which blazing rings you want ahead of arriving at them. However when I tried it tonight, rings kept disappearing on me which makes me think that other people can take them and that this might be best done when the server is a little quieter.

Also Christoph VonFeasel is in town with a chance of getting a new Syd the Squid Pet from his prize bag.

Miscellaneous

Chester also sells some rather attractive finery.

The Erinyes are there lamenting away and can be killed and looted for the ring but at the moment we aren’t high enough to turn in the quest. You will need probably need a group of four or five if not more to complete it at this level.